Hammer and Tongues

Forza Italia's hopes for the future are to rely on the game of ping pong. Marcello dell'Utri, founding father of the party, hopes to relaunch FI with a charming political initiative, praised by the blog Ilcannochiale. The idea is to find a kind of unifying glue for the Forza Italia youth clubs, starting from the table tennis table  (very original method of using sport for political ends).

Mr Dell'Utri explains that it is “important to involve young people in the game of ping pong. It is a wonderful game and teaches you never to give up (even when you have a first instance nine year prison sentence, n.d.t.). Even when you're losing,” continues the venerable intellectual, “all you need is one point and everything changes! After all, didn't Nixon break the ice in China by playing ping pong in Beijing?”

Thus spake Marcello in an interview with the daily “La Sicilia“.

Excellent initiative, concludes the excellent Cannochiale, especially when organised by such a great humanist and scholar as dell'Utri! And so far from the pong of Mafia!

PS Recommended reading for Marcello on the reorganization of youth and sport as a means of ideological control

Sport and Physical Education under Fascistization in Japan by Ikuo Abe, Yasuharu Kiyohara, and Ken Nakajima InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives June 2000

Marcello dell'Utri, founder of Forza Italia, right hand of man of Berlusconi and alleged go-between for Mafiaset, has apparently invited a member of the centre-left opposition (Nicola Latorre, Senator for the Left-Wing Democrats) to his next meeting. I wrote to  Senatore Latorre to ask him to confirm or deny the invitation to speak at the Circle of dell'Utri but have as yet received no reply.

Well, we live in a democracy, you might say, and wny shouldn't one give speeches wherever one wants?

Yet perhaps an elected “centre-left” politician might wish to avoid keeping company with someone who has already received a longish prison sentence in the lower courts for aiding and abetting the mafia. Of course there will be the appeal and then the final sentence in the Cassazione, and innocent until proven guilty etc.

But what about the question of good taste?

The new improved Vicenza airbase is back in the news with a vengeance: this is what my student Oswald Proietti wrote about it last November.

The enlargement of the American military base of  Vicenza

During  2004 Dick Cheney drowned out the enlargement of the military base of Vicenza, through the enlargement of the airport, to make Vicenza the major base of the American military power.
The program is based on the need to join the American troops settled in Germany and in other countries of Europe, making Vicenza the most important American military base in Europe.
This program has raised many problems among the citizens and in the Italian government. In the city of Vicenza, committees have been formed against the expansion of the base because it is going to be cause many problems such as polution, traffic and, the most important, the lowering of house values near the bases. At the same time, building contractors would earn with the contracts for the development of the base.
It's also a big political problem, because this project must have the agreement of the Italian government, but many groups belonging to the Government majority are against it. The previous government promised the Americans the authorization, but, with the change of administration, foreign politics have changed, and the objectives are divergent.

Another “constructive” dialogue came out of the Italian Parliament last November.  The question was a wrong interpretation of statistics about the number of prisoners pardoned until today.
This July Italian Government established that 15.000 prisoners would be freed because of the overcrowding in Italian jails. But today, Miss Melchiorre, a spokeswoman for the Minister of Justice, talked about 29.500 freed prisoners.
There was an immediate reaction from the Opposition, where the ex-Minister of Justice Castelli criticized a “Government of liars”. Somebody asked Prodi to accept his responsibility and explain this big mistake to the nation.
One hour late, the Prisoner Administration gave the corrected statistics, and ???  that it was only a logical error, a sum of things that can't be added, like “adding artichokes and pears” said the new Minister of Justice Mastella.

 In fact, there were included in the sum all the prisoners freed from July until today: the ones with a sentence that was not definitive, and also the ones
that had served their sentence.
 Everything terminated with the Government attacking the Opposition about its easiness of nonsense criticiscm, showing us another pretty ping-pong paired game, where nobody won but everybody is happy because another Parliamentary day has passed without a big effort, and no cerebral waves pollution  were found in the air.

(submitted by Oswald Proietti)

Lorenzo Cesa, national secretary of the Udc (Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e Democratici di Centro – Union of Democratic Christians, right of centre and fairly homophobic party – “No Pacs yes to the family, no to gay marriage”)  came under investigation by the Catanzaro Public Prosecutor's office last March for criminal conspiracy and fraud. According  to Public prosecutor Luigi De Magistris, the European MP was allegedly, between 2001-04, one of the «promoters and organisers» of fraudulent use of EU funding to the detriment of the Union and the Calabria Region, to the tune of 5 billion old lire. Cesa had been a partner in the Spb Optical Disk srl, a firm specialising in the reproduction and sale of DVDs. Other partners, engineer Giovanbattista Papello, former deputy commissioner for environmental emergencies in Calabria, and Fabio Schettini, segretary of former Minister Franco Frattini, also came under investigation. They were supposed to have been investing monies obtained from the EEC Por  progamme (Programma operativo regionale) in Calabrian industry.
The Corriere della Sera reported that a factory supposed to be built in the Mangone district of Cosenza for the production of DVDs and other digital material, creating about forty jobs, was never finished. According to the Catanzaro carabinieri, only a part of it was built and nothing was ever manufactured. An official witness statement revealed, furthermore, that although that factory never went into production, it had already accumulated debts of 1,6000,000 euros.
 «I was surprised to see that the firm had already successfully been given the go-ahead in spite of the fact that the building still wasn’t finished. The roof was missing and there was no connection to the sewage system».
The new owner explained to police investigators that the «machine for the manufacture of plastic packaging for CDs also appears to have passed its tests” although the machine «hadn’t even been unpacked».
It was the «Poseidon» enquiry into illegal financing for sewage treatment in Calabria which had originally led to the notification of investigation against Cesa. In May 2005 the former President of the Region Giuseppe Chiaravalloti  and the regional environmental chief Domenico Basile had been among those under investigation.
According to the prosecution, the involvement of Cesa began with a series of companies «created ad hoc to favour commercial and business operations».
At the end of  2004 Cesa, Papello e Schettini had decided to sell their shares in Spb Optical Disk and, according to the prosecutor’s reconstruction of facts, offer them to Salvatore Di Ganci, a 59 year old Sicilian, brother of two men already sentenced to prison terms and former business partners of Enrico Nicoletti, the “cashier” of the Magliana gang (arrested in 1996  for corruption of a high court judge) and owner of Data General Security, a giant in the field of telephone security. The very firm that in in 2006 was at the centre of investigations not only by the Catanzaro Public Prosecutor’s office but also the Milan office dealing with illegal spying of politicians
Pm Luigi De Magistris collaborated with his colleagues in Milan to identify possible connections between the two enquiries.
In his recent book “Onorevole Wanted“, Peter Gomez and Marco Travaglio confirm that during a seach of Giovanbattista Papello’s house, a massonic apron and illegal recordings of DS secretary Piero Fassino, Pietro Folena (RC) and the president of Anas Vincenzo Pozzi were found.

The fun continued for Cesa in December. On 16 Dicembre 2006 the Espresso reported that he had also received notification of the opening of an internal enquiry into two and a half million euros of EEC funds awarded to the Calabrese company Digitaleco by Olaf, (European anti-fraud commission). The investigation, which also involves Movimondo,  has recently been at the centre of heated political debate because the NGO had been presided over by the present Foreign Undersecretary Donato di Santo, to whose  public defence during parliamentary question time Foreign Secretary Massimo D’Alema leapt. Little wonder that Cesa was so interested in Olaf. No sooner was he elected in 2004 than he began to busy himself with the its function and aims. He wrote: “I will surely do everything I can within the limits of my mandate, to ensure that OLAF is an effective tool for legality, that it is the first to repect the law and legality and I will be very strict, within the limits of my mandate, about reporting eventual lapses. But I will also do my utmost to prevent OLAF from becoming a dangerous toy in the hands of those who wish to play, in their own interests and against the interests of law and order for all citizens.”

He needn’t worry about Olaf being effective: the number of prosecutions  is ludicrously small. In June 2006 Mr Ashley Mote testified before a Select Committee on European Union that “OLAF is a deeply compromised organisation. Its President, Dr Bruner, has just been reappointed in the most curious circumstances. I have documentary evidence about those circumstances and I have questions at the moment in front of Commissioner Kallas from Estonia who is supposedly responsible for the fight against fraud and corruption. Those questions remain unanswered about the reappointment of Dr Bruner. Whilst he has been President of OLAF for the last seven years, OLAF has not yet succeeded in a single successful prosecution and the recovery of the monies involved. Not one.”

Cesa is just one of the many UDC politicians to be investigated for criminal activities, mafia-connected and otherwise. Of course, as politicians left, right and centre, and with very few exceptions always hasten to point out, all men (and women) are innocent until proven guilty. In Italy they are often innocent afterwards too.

Cesare Previti's glorious giudicial CV has been enriched by yet another court case  which is to begin 19 April next. He is accused of slander (calumny),  i.e. making false and damaging statements about members of the Milanese investigative pool prosecutors Ilde Boccassini and Gerardo Colombo in relation to their management of documents protected by investigative secrecy 95/20. The decision was taken by Lorenzo Benini, “GUP” (giudice per l'udienza preliminaria), the judge for the preliminary hearing whose job it is to decide whether or not to indict suspects.

The investigation originated in a complaint made by the so-called “National Committee for Justice”, an organisation of Forza Italia fans in Umbria, together with Previti himself (btw the Committee website is a front for the dell'Utri Forza Italia youth clubs, not quite Hitler Youth but perhaps Up.with-Italy Youth? n.d.t.)

This backfired on them, as  the judge for preliminary investigations (GIP) passed the dossier on to the Brescia public attorneys asking them to establish whether or not there was a case to be answered for slander, based on the claim that a member of the Finance Police supposedly destroyed the original CD containing the tapped conversations between judge Renato Squillante and Rome Public Attorney Francesco Misiani.

According to the Brescia investigators, the accusation of slander also refers to the claim that Stefania Ariosto was a paid witness, set up ad hoc by the Milan prosecutors and the Finance Police in order to nail down Squillante. At this juncture Previti was formally investigated and the Bresica prosecutor's office demanded the indictment of the former defence Minister.

On Tuesday 12th December the GUP Benini decided that Previti would go to trial next April.

According to one of Cesare Previti's lawyers, after this decision, “trial itself should be under investigation.  In other words, one should be putting on trial the many trials which my client has had to undergo. Paradoxically, Previti is the accused, but he simply has to answer for saying what he has always thought and believed to be true.

translated (freely) from Marco Travaglio’s article “Se lo lasci non vale” Unità 9 December 2006

If you belong to Berlusconi’s entourage and your ardour as a faithful follower is cooling off, think twice before you try to get away. Many people have timidly tried to distance themselves from Baldilocks over the years, to their detriment. The first, as chronicled by Marco Travaglio in the Unità (9 December 2006), was Umberto Bossi, responsible for the downfall of Berlusconi’s first misgovernment in 1994.

“The leader of the party of love and freedom apostrophized him as “Judas, traitor, a man with a double and triple personality, thief and receiver of stolen votes – all of this before Parliament. From that moment on, United TV channels were chock full of reports about Northern league members abandoning the Northern League, interviews with members who were allegedly tearing up their party membership cards, imaginary opinion polls which placed the League at 0.001% or even below zero, and idyllic portraits of the leaders of the “true League”, those faithful to Berlusconi (Bobo Maroni). Then Bossi and his party disappeared from all TV channels. In 1999, after five years of cathode ray ostracism, the Senatùr returned to the fold.
In July 1995, Stefania Ariosto decided to reveal what she had seen at the court of Berlusconi and Previti; as a Christmas present she received a surprise parcel containing a severed rabbit’s head dripping with blood. In April 1996, Chiara Beria di Argentine published in the Espresso photos of Ariosto – portrayed as a “mythomaniac” by Previti & Co, together with Previti & Co. Just a few weeks later, her villa in Tuscany was blasted to smithereens in a mysterious bomb attack. In 2004, after the nth electoral turnabout, the then secretary of the Udc Marco Follini forced Berlusconi’s government to face up to a frank reappraisal of their policies. At one of the many summit conferences of that period, Baldilocks gave Follini and Casini clearly to understand that they should not be playing with fire. “You ex-Christian Democrats have really pissed me off, you Pierferdinando, have pissed me of and so has your secretary Follini. Old style politics is over. I know your irresponsible methods. You hand out favours left right and centre and collect votes, but I will denounce you, you will not get away with it, I will destroy you. I know how to use my TV channels and I will use them. Is that clear? You have pissed me off (… etc etc) (Libero February 2004).”

Berlusconi continued to threaten Follini with a campaign of denigration on TV if he did not tow the line.

“‘Just wait and see see how my TV channels treat you’. Follini protested at this threat (newspapers of 12 July 2004). Then Berlusconi moved on to Follini’s family. “Mrs Follini was angry because I said that politics was her husband’s only passion? I am pleased to hear that he does other things apart from talking about politics…” (14 December 2004)
From that time on, Follini disappeared, replaced by a certain Cesa (with a not exactly shining white criminal record, n.d.t.). When he goes out for a meal he takes a food-taster with him, supplies of polonium being far from exhausted.
It is now “Piercasinando’s” turn. Libero names him as a traitor, while the Company Newspaper dedicates an entire page of threats and insults to him. Someone even mentions the name of Carlo Giovinardi (Forza Italia politician on loan to the UDC) as the next leader. Not even the most imaginative satirist could have suspected that he had any fans. However, waste not want not. The newspaper of the bishops immediately dedicated an extensive and detailed interview to this crowd-puller. We will shortly be hearing about Scaramella’s revelations on the decisive role played by Casini in the Kgb, the murder of Aldo Moro and the attempt to assassinate the Pope.”

Based on an article from the  Corriere della sera, November 29, 2006

On July 21, 2001 during G8 in Genoa, Carlo Giuliani was killed by a gun shot. Now, Placanica, the Carabiniere accused of this crime and subsequently acuitted, made some new statements.  He declared that he had shot in the air, not at Giuliani; demonstrators threw things, he shouted that he would shoot and then he shot in the air.
Moreover, he declared that the tension was very high: his senior officers spoke about a terrorist attack. Other Carabinieri and police should have intervened to disperse demonstrators, but they left him alone. He said that he was in the wrong place and he was untrained to face that situation.
When Placanica went back to the barracks, the other Carabinieri gave a party: they were happy,Placanica said.

A lot of things are not so clear and cremating Giuliani's corpse was a mistake.

Giovanni Russo Spena, chairman of the Comunist Rifondazione Party in the Senate, declares that these revelations show a worrying reality and that a parliamentary inquiry is necessary. Ignazio La Russa, chairman of National Alliance in the Chamber, declares that it would be an attempt to accuse the armed forces, an old practice.

Giulia Villani